Think Pipeline - PipelineDeals CRM

Important Notice: For Deal Tags Users - Changes Launching Soon

Please read this post if you are a current user of deal tags and the deal tags report.   We will be launching several important changes soon.

Deal Tags Entry

Deal tags will no longer be on the bottom of the deals page.  They will display in the new Deal Details section.  You can also change a deal tag to be required entry.

You will be able to add new custom fields to your deals as mentioned in a prior blog post which will all display in the new Deal Details section at the top of the page.

Deals Directory Changes

There will no longer be a deal tags list for filtering in the Deals Directory.  Instead you will be able create the same list as before by simply typing a tag name in the search box.  For example, if you were used to working through a tagged list of deals for "financial services" or a specific region "Asia", or any tag, simply type it into the search box.   

You will see a list of all deals associated with the tag.  In the example below, you can see all deals associated with the tag "Technology".   The search feature will also work with any picklist field type and values.  

Deal Tags Report

The current deal tags report will move to the new Custom Reports section within Reports.  You will be able to do advanced filtering as well as save queries off of the report just as before.  You could also create variations of the report with less columns, or additional custom fields.

Deal Tags Maintenance

Deal Tags maintenance will now be done in the Setup Deal Custom Fields section in the Admin Tool. You can rename the label Deal Tags, add new picklist values, as well as add new fields to the deals page.  You can also make the fields mandatory entry.

Preview #2 - Powerful New Features to Manage Your Sales Pipeline

In the last blog post, we previewed adding custom fields to your deals page giving you new power to your sales pipeline.  Today, we are previewing the ability to create custom reports so you leverage the new power of your deal custom fields.

Custom Reports

You will now be able to build and save your own custom report based on your deal data.  In the example below, I added several new fields to my deals page:

• Product Interest
• Industry
• Regions
• Delivery Date
• Services $
• Forecast $

With the custom reporting feature, you can build a report with up to 10 fields from the standard deal fields as well as your custom fields.  You can have the columns in any order, and you can filter on any combination of the fields.

So, let's say you wanted to create a report to see all of your deals for a specific product or service, or a within a specific industry, or a specific region, or any combination, you would be able to do that with our new custom reports feature.

Preview #1: Powerful New Features to Manage Your Sales Pipeline

PipelineDeals is excited to announce some important new changes coming to the Deals page.

New Custom Fields for Deals

PipelineDeals will soon allow you to add custom fields directly to your deals page.  Fields can be any of the following types:

• Numeric
• Currency
• Text
• Picklists
• Dates
• Forecast

How can you take advantage of this feature?

We have received many requests from our customers who just want to add one (1) additional field to their deals to track additional revenue $ in their sales pipeline, or several additional fields that are unique to their industry.   We have supported the latter in the past with our deal tags feature.

Slice and Dice Your Sales Pipeline

This new feature will allow you to capture and track data for your sales pipeline along any dimension that you can think of - for example you could add deal fields to track:

• Geographic Region
• Product or Service Interest(s)
• Competitor
• Total Revenue Potential
• Forecast Amount
• Commissions

Simply create a new field, give it a name, define some pick list values and apply it to your deals.   You will also have the ability to make the field required, totaled in reports, and the define the display order.

Example #1 - Capture Industry Specific Data for Your Deals

Manufacturing Company
Let's say you are a manufacturing company, and you need to keep track of product units as well as the customer's product interest.   

You can simply add new fields to your deals page, called "Product Units" and "Product Interest". 

Real Estate Brokerage
If you are a real estate firm and need to keep track of deals for property types, key buying features and buyer's price ranges, you could add those fields onto the deals page.

Example #2 - Capture More Sales $ Details

Add some additional sales and revenue details to your deal:

- Total Potential $ of the Account/Relationship

- Forecast $ - We will automatically calculate this for you based on probability x your $ amount field.

- Services $ - Break down your deals according to product and service $

Example #3 - Sales Process and Methodology

If you follow a very specific or structured sales methodology, you can add important deal criteria to the deals page to manage your sales team and deals:

In this example, you can track and report on:

• Overall position summary on the deal
• Red Flags
• Specific Buyers that may or may not be identified on the deal
• Next Actions

How does this feature work with deal tags?

There are several important changes related to deal tags.

1. Deal tags currently listed at the bottom of the deals page, will moved into the Deal Details section.   You will no longer need to scroll to the bottom of the page, which should facilitate deal entry.

2. You will be able to make a deal tag required entry if you so choose.

3. You could also rename your deal tags to a more meaningful name.  For example, if you are using deal tags for labeling deals with products and regions, you could easily create 2 new fields  and name them Products, and Regions (instead of deal tags).

4. The deal tags report will be in a new location.  (more on this in the next blog post).

More information on the new feature coming in the next preview.

Now Live - Customize Your Colors and Logo!

PipelineDeals is very excited to announce custom colors and branding! Have you ever wondered what PipelineDeals would look like in forest green or ruby red? You can now design you very own color themes to match your corporate colors and even upload your logo.

Below are three examples of the new colors you can apply to your account!

This is a great way to ensure consistency with your own brand and corporate culture. These cosmetic improvements also enable you to create your own custom Log In and Log Out pages.

Below is an example of a custom branded account and the unique Log In and Log Out pages.

Log In:

Log Out:

We’ve created some themes to help get you started. You can select the one that best matches your colors then tweak it to make it a perfect match. If you're not satisfied, you can simply start over.

Below is our list of standard themes.  You can pick from any of the following or create your very own:

To get started,  log in as an Administrator. Click on the "Admin" link then click on "Customize Colors".

• Step 1 is to select your theme.
• Step 2 is to customize the colors with the color picker.
• Step 3 is to upload your logo or type in your company name.
• Step 4. Create a special log in address. This subdomain can be anything you want though your company name is a good choice.  Then, you can access your branded site by going to your subdomain:

https://[yourname].pipelinedeals.com

We will automatically re-size logos to fit within the allocated maximum height. We recommend JPEG images smaller than 300 pixels wide by 50 pixels tall.

The preview box will display exactly what your color selections and logo will look like when you are ready to publish the changes.

Once you are satisfied with your custom branded account, bookmark your Login page and click save. Everyone on your team will be redirected to your new account when they access PipelineDeals.

Keep an eye out for this exciting new feature in the coming days. Enjoy!

New Lead Managment Features!

PipelineDeals is happy to announce several powerful new lead management features. You can now customize color indicators, find leads by geography, save advanced searches and more.

Watch this video to see a quick tutorial of the new lead management features

Here's what’s new:

We made the distinction between Leads and Contacts more concrete. We think of Leads as new business relationships and sales prospects that you want to qualify into Deals.  They differ from Contacts in that Leads are relationships that you need to begin to cultivate and whose source you ultimately want to track.

When you import or add leads, they will appear on the Leads tab until you convert them into a Deal. All relationships that you import or add to the Leads tab will stay on the worklist until they become associated to a Deal. Once you convert a Lead into a Deal a Contact will automatically be created for the relationship.

For example, lets say you added Stephen Jobs as a Lead today then qualifed Steve by calling him. You could then convert Steve into the Apple Deal. This would remove Steve from the Leads worklist and you would find him associated to the Apple Deal with his full profile in the Contacts tab.

New features:

Lead Statuses- Custom color indicators to organize your leads by priority, status, product, geography or step in your process.

 
Modified Date- You can now quickly churn your stale relationships by filtering on last the modified date for your Leads. Leads are considered modified if you Change a Status, Add a Tag, Add or Complete a To-Do, Re-Assign or update the Lead Contact details.

Faster Note Entry-  To write a note, simply click into a row then type away in the Notes box. Once you’re finished press enter and the note will automatically be submitted.

Quicker To-Do Entry- A cleaner form will make it easier than ever to add follow ups for your Leads. Simple click into a row then press on the To-Do’s tab.

Update Lead Info- You can now even update a Leads contact details right from the worklist. If you are calling on a new prospect and they give you an updated phone number, you click into the row, press on Lead Info and change the information right there.

Advanced Filtering- You can use advanced filters to multi-select on Tags, Statuses, Owners, Sources and more. You can also run reports on all your leads in specific places and time frames. For example, you can search for all your Leads in California that like to Golf added in the past 6 months.

Saved Searches- You can now save advanced searches for future reference. Click on more ways to filter, select your criteria, then save and name your report. This report will appear in a drop down menu for your convenience. 

Lead Profile Page- Clicking on a Leads name will take you to the Lead Profile Page where you can further update a Lead’s details.

Pagination Remembered- If you are working on page three then go to your Calendar and come back to the Leads tab, it will remember what you were working on.

Thanks for reading about these new lead management features. Please let us know what you think!

-The PipelineDeals Team

Now Live: Improved Leads Management Features

We are excited to be introducing some changes and new features to our leads management capabilities.

Color Coding Status Indicators

We are introducing simple custom color-coded status indicators to easily manage your leads.  The status indicator can be defined by your administrator and have any color you would like. 

There are many ways you can use the color coding.  One way is to color code your leads by priority, by next action required, by a step in your leads follow-up process.   We will give you some pre-defined lead statuses for managing hot, warm, cold and archived leads.

 

Easy Editing of Leads Info

You will now be able to edit your leads without ever leaving the leads tab.  Just click the lead row and a new editing form will be exposed.  You can now quickly change a name misspelling, a phone number or address.  When you click on a Leads name in the Leads Tab, you will go to the Leads Profile Page and not the Contact Profile Page.

In addition, you can also update any tags, lead source or statuses from the form.

More Ways to Filter

We are introducing our powerful reporting to the leads module.   This feature allows you to create a simple report based on selecting one or more criteria for your leads.   

This is very powerful as you can create a leads report based on any or all of the critiera:

• Status
• Owners  
• Tags 
• Source 
• State  
• City 
• Zip or Postal Code 
• Modified Date  
• Create Date 

  

 
For example you could quickly find all your Leads in Colorado in a specific zip code then save the report.

Below is an example saved report sorted by company name.


  
Leads Pagination Remembered

You will now be able to work your leads and we will remember exactly where you left if you leave the page. No more clicking on the pagination.

Leads Counts

You will also see a new leads count for your total leads as well as any filtered totals similar to reports.

PLEASE READ - Changes to Existing Features

Leads 

Definition - an unqualified business opportunity. All Leads currently in your Leads tab will still be there.  Leads will display on your leads worklist for the following scenarios:

Add a lead manually via the Add a Lead Form

Imported via CSV file 

Web to Leads - using our web to leads feature 

Convert a contact to a lead

Contacts 

Definition - A qualified business opportunity or existing relationship. Contacts are displayed in the contacts tab if the following events occur:

• Add a contact manually via a form
• Import contacts via a CSV file 
• You convert a lead to a deal
• Add a new person to deal

Please note:  A relationship can either be a lead or contact but not both.    

Converting Leads to Deals

You can convert leads to contacts by selecting a lead from the leads worklist and clicking the convert to deal link.  Performing this action results in the following:

• Lead will be removed from the leads worklist
• Lead will be converted to an existing relationship and display on the deals page associated to the deal 
• Person will now become a contact
• You will find the contact in the Contacts Rolodex and under contacts in rover search

Lead Archiving

Lead Archiving will be handled differently with the updated leads tab.  To archive a lead, you will just need to set the pre-defined status indicator.  All of your archived leads will display on your leads worklist. 

Worklists

Worklists will no longer be supported and will be replaced with the new More Ways to Filter feature described above.   Please note any existing worklists will not be converted to the new reports. We regret any inconvenience this may cause but hope you find these new features capable of rebuilding the lists easily.

Please let us know what you think.

The PipelineDeals Team

Team Selling and Collaboration

PipelineDeals is a powerful sales collaboration tool. As long as you have the internet you can work with your team to manage your sales pipeline from anywhere in the world. PipelineDeals is designed to work with a group to get everyone organized around your lead qualification and sales pipeline management. One of the best things about PipelineDeals is that it you can quickly and easily share information with the people who need it most.

With an open contact model you and your team can share all the same relationships and keep track of who says what to whom. This way, everyone has the most up to date contact details and records.

With PipelineDeals you can also share and publish documents to your whole team. If you use consistent marketing literature and want everyone on the same page, you can easily upload the newest sales resources to everyone in your account.

With a shared contact model, everyone in your account can check to see if there are other contacts at a company they are targeting, or check if someone is already working with a particular client. When adding new relationships, we also verify for duplicates based on Last Name and Email to prevent double entry.

PipelineDeals can help you and your team work together to close new business opportunities. Team selling used to be challenging because it was hard to know who was working on what. Now you can use the Deals page to assign responsibilities and share information.

For example, if Nick Smith owns the Apple Deal he could choose to share it with several of his colleagues. Apple represents a large business opportunity for this Nick's company and he wants to make sure that everyone is aware of its progress.

To share a Deal go to the Deal actions menu, select share, then type a few letters of a colleague’s last name. You can share Deals with anyone you want. When you do, your colleagues will receive email notifications that you’ve shared a deal with them.

Once you’ve shared a Deal, several new tools become available to you. For starters you can begin to use the Conversations thread.

Conversations keep track of an ongoing dialogue between you and anyone you share a Deal with. Below, Nick and Sarah are discussing how to move forward on the Apple Deal. If someone posts a new Conversation, everyone shared on the Deal gets notified by email.

Once you share a Deal you can also assign responsibilities to anyone collaborating on the deal. In the previous example, Nick is going to send a Thank You and Sarah is preparing a Sales Proposal. If you share a Deal and assign to-dos to colleagues, they will be notified by email of their responsibility, and you will be emailed once they complete their task.

We’re interested to hear your thoughts on how we can improve the team selling features in PipelineDeals. Don’t be shy, leave a comment or send us a message at customercare[at]pipelinedeals.com

Your Sales Process and PipelineDeals

Below are several questions that can help to guide the way you think about your sales process. Once you have defined the crucial phases of your methodology you can quickly and easily apply it to PipelineDeals.

Its important to take time to think about your sales strategies. This is a good exercise to conduct if you are thinking about using a sales team tool or already do.

Leads are the lifeblood of future business. Generally, leads are unqualified business relationships that you want to convert into potential clients. Think about the following regarding your lead generation. 

• How do you generate new business Leads?
• Who is responsible for managing Leads?
• Where do you get Leads from? What are you Lead Sources?
• How does your prospecting and qualifying work? Is there a formal process?

We recommend adding all new potential business relationships into the Leads Tab. Here you can easily call on your Leads, write notes and create follow up tasks. Once your Leads “qualify” you can select them and promote them into a Deal. Once you’ve converted a Lead into Deal, you can set a value to the business opportunity and define its Sales Stage. 

Deals are qualified business opportunities that you would like to formally track in your sales pipeline.

Regarding Deals:

• What are your Sales Stages/Steps in your sales funnel?
• Do you work primarily B2B or B2C? Have you thought about how to name your Deals?
• How long does your sales cycle take?
• Does your team collaborate to win Deals?
• How do you communicate with your clients? How would you like to capture your correspondence/notes?

Every company has a different process so configuring your Deal Stages is a great way to make the system more relevant to your selling environment.

Deal/Contact Tags:

* Deal Tags let you answer questions like: How much business is your company closing in Canada vs. US. Or in Staffing vs. Professional HR Services. Have you thought about how you can use tags?
Contact Tags can help you organize your Relationships by Priority, Industry, Hobbies etc.

Deal Tags have reporting implications and allow you to filter your Sales Pipeline Report by the Tags or keywords you apply to your Deals. Be sure to apply these to your Deals if you want to report on them.

Your Team:

There are effectively 3 tiers of user roles in PipelineDeals. Executives, who can roll-up reporting and see an aggregate Sales Pipeline. Managers, who can re-assign Deals and see a Sales Pipeline for a team of Basic Users beneath them. Finally, Basic users only see the Deals and Contacts that they are assigned (assuming you are using a closed contact model). Below is a very simple organizational chart to show you what a team might look like. Deals are always private unless someone chooses to share a Deal with someone else. There are 2 settings for contacts visibility. An open model means that everyone in the entire account has access to every contact. This suits a lot of smaller companies that use a pool of salesmen that share data. A closed model behaves just like deals visibility, using the hierarchical system.

• How is your company's sales team organized?
• What degree of transparency do you have?

Once you review these points, you can set up your account very quickly or tweak your current process to better streamline your business. Feel free to send us your thoughts or questions. We’re happy to provide feedback on your current sales process and look forward to helping you better manage your business development.

A Simple Sales Tool: PipelineDeals and Your Email

We just made some improvements to the PipelineDeals Inbox. You can use any email client including Outlook, Gmail, Thunderbird, Hotmail or Yahoo with PipelineDeals.

When you email your clients, all you have to do is BCC, CC, or Forward your messages to your username@pipelinedeals.com

If you click on a contact's email address in PipelineDeals, we simply launch your default email program. We populate the contact's email address and also BCC your username@pipelinedeals.com. These emails will be automatically associated with the correct Contact/Lead profile and even append attached email documents. 

This gives you the ability to track email communications and correspondence for any Deal you are working with a specific contact.

When a contact can't be found, we'll automatically create a new one for you, saving you time!

Finally, if you need to append a receipt, automated email or invoice to a Contact or Deal and you don't want PipelineDeals to create a new contact for you, email inbox@pipelinedeals.com. These message will arrive in your Inbox and you can process them later.

Watch this video to learn how PipelineDeals works with your email.

How is your business doing?

This question is on the minds of almost everyone I come in contact with these days. Friends, customers, family, associates, perspective customers - you name it. This question prompts me to share more about PipelineDeals, our philosophy and how you can apply what we have learned to help and grow your business.

We built PipelineDeals from the beginning using admittedly old-fashioned principles. At the time we were told we were not being "aggressive enough" or we needed to "get big fast". Our response: No thank you. We were fortunate enough to have some early and sage advice from two people: a close friend and an accomplished entrepreneur in her own right, as well as a family member who is an accomplished businessman. The distilled version of their advice was:

+ Organize and understand your business around your financials.
+ Earn revenue first, hire people later.

Looking back over the last three years these two chunks of wisdom were critical to our success thus far. Other key decisions paying off today (each will probably be a follow up post in their own right):

+ No VC, Angel or Friends & Family money.

+ Stay obsessively focused on your niche.

+ Service the heck out of your niche.

+ When you must hire, hire insanely good people.

+ Listen and act on feedback from your Customers.

Fast forward to today - these decisions have provided us with self-reliance and a healthy balance sheet.  In one word: Sustainability. I don't believe any company is immune to today's economic climate, however these early decisions have set us up to weather most storms. Specifically, we remain privately held and profitable while not worrying about "raising another round of financing" and whether it will be an "up round" or "down round". We are able to stay focused on executing our business as cleanly and as well as possible without distraction thanks to making some early fundamental decisions. Our business model forces us earn our customers' patronage every month and thankfully we continue to do so month in and month out, year in and year out.

Put these strategies into motion in your business, so the next time someone asks you the question: "How is your business doing?" you will be able to answer positively. Lastly, please feel free to write to me should you want to discuss these ideas or others at jp (at) pipelinedealsco (dot) com.

As a footnote, Reid Hoffman, the CEO and Founder of the world's most popular business social networking site LinkedIn had a thought provoking column today in The Washington Post about start ups and their role in restarting the economy. A worthwhile read.

Wishing you nothing but success,

JP Werlin
Co-Founder, PipelineDeals

Image: A Dutch Ship in a Storm by Matthieu van Plattenberg from the Mid-17th Century.